


how to save a life

by lionized



Category: Justified
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-16
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-12-05 12:42:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/723435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionized/pseuds/lionized
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raylan's back in Harlan, and Boyd can't stop thinking about how it used to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how to save a life

Raylan shuts the Crowders' front door quietly, not because he doesn't like the noise, but because by now he's learned that slamming it only makes it jump back from its ill-fitting frame to catch the visitor in the ass. He gets a few steps in without saying anything, but Boyd hears him just the same, calls out from the living room.

"That you, Raylan?"

"Yeah huh."

"What are you just standin' out there for? You're not company."

Boyd's grinning like he always does, too many teeth for his jaw and all the menace in the world curled up behind his eyes. Even when he's around people he likes, he's never entirely at ease. And Boyd Crowder does like Raylan, though he probably shouldn't, because even at eighteen and going nowhere, Raylan has something under his skin that Boyd likes to privately think of as a "call to arms." It means that no matter what, in their world where drinking-lying-stealing is less a bad habit and more as natural as pulling on your socks before your shoes, he will always be colored by self-righteousness. He'll always have that rigid set to his shoulders that contradicts the obscene way his spine slouches under his shirts, he'll always have that sense of being Better instead of Other, and not an entirely undeserved one, either. Boyd doesn't remember when he stopped seeing Raylan with bruises scattered across his face, but he's pretty sure that soon after that, he realized that it was just another difference between them. No matter the reason, whether after a time, Arlo was just afraid of having his ass handed back to him the minute he cocked his arm back, or whether someone intervened and took the brunt of that drunken rage each time, something was looking after Raylan.

(Boyd is pretty damn sure there's nothing looking after _him_ , and his daddy won't ever stop hitting. Doesn't matter how big Boyd gets, whether or not old age makes his father frail; Bo Crowder will have the faint pull mark on his palm from where he wraps the belt around it until the day he dies. Fists are for men, Bo says, swinging it underhanded. Fists are for men and you're nothing but a little chickenshit faggot and it's good your mama's gone so she doesn't have to see your face every morning.)

But that's just talk and none of it matters when the curtains get drawn closed and Raylan turns away from the darkened window to look at him. The house is quiet all around them, standing empty for a whole entire weekend, and they can talk and not talk and everything in between, and nobody's going to have anything to say about it as long as Raylan gets home before it gets too late. _Little chickenshit faggot_ , Boyd thinks again, in his daddy's voice, just to see. It doesn't pack any real punch when he's watching Raylan come to him from across the room, settle in his lap, his jeans pulled tight over his thighs. And it packs even less of one when they make it upstairs, and the blanket's on the floor with all the pillows, and Raylan has his hands curled over the top of the mattress, because Boyd doesn't have a headboard. _Fists are for men_ , he thinks, too. And when there's no space left between them anymore, when there's sweat that isn't his dripping into his eyes, when Raylan's working his hand down between them to encircle Boyd's cock and make up for the way his own is absolutely splitting him apart, Boyd snaps his hips up into Raylan's fist and smiles that lazy cat smile through the pain. Sometimes, his daddy's right even when he doesn't know it.

___

Raylan leaves and no one can tell Boyd what for or where. He asks Bo about it once, when the man's come back off a petty possession charge, over dinner. The way his hand goes still with the fork halfway to his mouth, the way he just looks at Boyd like there's nothing sitting in that chair but wasted potential and too many questions, makes damn sure he never brings it up again.

A couple of years after he comes home, he stops feeling that prickle at the back of his neck when he hears a car driving up the road and he isn't expecting anybody.

He doesn't stop thinking about it, though, and he thinks about everything. The first time Raylan ever fucked him, bending him over the arm of the couch with one of his knees on the cushion and the other foot on the floor -- it hurt like nobody's business and he thought he'd be bleeding, or worse, when Raylan came and pulled out. He put his fingers back there to check and found nothing bad. Just come, clear and slippery and smelling like he used to imagine the ocean. Every time they traded blowjobs, kneeling in cramped spaces and fighting back the urge to choke. The one and only time Raylan let Boyd fuck him right back, and how he'd barely gotten all the way in before Raylan said no, said stop. Boyd did, and they never talked about it again.

There's one of those Stories that goes around, the precursor to local legend, about how when they were playing ball in high school, Raylan reset Dickie Bennett's knee in a fight after a bad pitch. Everybody knows someone who was at the field that day, but they were never there themselves -- Boyd wasn't there, either, but he imagines it sometimes when he comes. Raylan twisted at the hips, making that connection like he's hitting a home run clear through the ground, like if it goes hard and far enough he'll hit the devil clean in the face, make him let go of that hold he's got on Harlan, the curse that keeps everybody standing still like puddle water and makes them think it's a blessing.

When Boyd sees Raylan at the converted church that day, passes him over a glass of the drink and tells him that mudpeople story (his personal favorite, and a congregation hit) while trying so very hard not to look surprised, he wonders if Raylan didn't make that home run after all.

\---

Boyd has been sleeping in Ava's spare bedroom for two months, three weeks, and five days when she kisses him in the kitchen after doing the washing up. He doesn't realize it right away, but this is how she works, feeling everything out behind closed doors before she decides if she wants to keep it for the street. Like somebody trying on a set of clothes and then wearing them out of the store. He knows two things when she wraps her slim fingers around the back of his neck -- that Ava Crowder is the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, let alone that's kissed him of her own free will, and that she'd started fucking Raylan before her husband's body was even cold. Her tongue slips into his mouth and he only knows one.

"Did Raylan kiss you like that?" He asks it when she pulls away from him, and her eyes flash cold for just a moment before she sees he isn't angry, and he isn't mocking her, either.

"No," she replies, and reaches for him a second time.

They don't make it up to her bed. He asks her again when he has her pushed up against the counter. Her skirt's hiked up around her hips and his tongue curls off her teeth, mimicking the way he curls two fingers inside her cunt, swallowing the moan she gives him, sweet and long. "Did Raylan touch you like this?" She doesn't answer and he bears his thumb down against her clit until she finds her voice again, cries out a _yes_ that could be encouragement or a definitive statement. Boyd decides he can take it however he wants. She tries to touch him after, come a slick sheen on the inside of her thighs, her breathing still broken up. He tells her it's alright.

(Boyd still doesn't sleep in her bed, and that night Ava crawls into his, sliding under the sheet. It's hot enough that he sleeps naked, trading manners for comfort only in weather like that. He's about to stop her, putting one hand up on her shoulder, feeling the strap of her nightgown move under his palm, and she smiles kindly through the dim. "I'll show you how I did it for Raylan," she says. He pushes his fingers into her hair instead.)

\---

One afternoon, before she goes to work, Boyd asks Ava if she was there that day on the baseball field. She says she was. When he asks her to tell him how it went, she paints him a picture like she'd seen it happen that morning. She falters when she tries to describe the swing, the way Raylan really puts his shoulder into it, and Boyd looks her in the eye like he's been waiting to talk about it for years, and says, "I always thought he'd look like Michael."

"Michael who?"

"The Archangel."

She doesn't say anything, but her eyes go funny and far away, and he realizes for the first time that no matter what, Ava will always be a little bit in love with Raylan Givens. Boyd doesn't say anything, either. He's pretty sure he understands.

\---

Boyd sits in his truck outside Raylan's motel, drinking whiskey out of a thermos -- desperate measures for the times. He's seen him come in, get out of that lawman car and walk that lawman walk right up to the front door, let himself inside. And then there's nothing. Not the blare of the TV, coming dully through the walls, not the sound of a woman -- not that he really thought Raylan would have one in there waiting for him. The light comes on and doesn't go off again.

He climbs down onto the ground and gets the baseball bat out of the back.

When Raylan opens the door, he doesn't look particularly surprised to see Boyd standing there. He doesn't look particularly happy, either, but Boyd supposes he's willing to start somewhere. He pushes the bat between them, the end of the handle thudding into the center of Raylan's chest. Wordlessly, he takes it, and Boyd reaches up to hook his fingers over the top of the doorframe.

"Boyd, what the fuck are you--"

Boyd cuts him off. "It should have been me."

"What?"

"When you were playing ball. I should've been there and it should've been me."

Raylan's looking at him like it doesn't make sense, and maybe it doesn't. He's been holding on to the idea for long enough that he thinks everything should come out smoothly when he's ready to talk about it, but maybe nothing goes smoothly in Harlan anymore, maybe it never has, maybe it only does if you leave.

"Just get in here."

He does, slamming the door behind himself, and he never sees it coming. Raylan has the bat cocked up and his hands wrapped around it, and he brings it back like he's never done anything but that in his entire life. He doesn't get Boyd in the knee, but the side of the leg's as good as any.

The pain is like nothing has ever been before, maybe like nothing will ever be again. Boyd imagines the moment of impact, wonders if bones shatter under the skin like windshields and windows, spiderweb cracks so fine you could scuff your thumb over them and never feel a break. He goes down and Raylan comes over him, kneeling on either side of his thighs, stretching the widest part of the baseball bat over his throat.

"I prayed for you, Raylan," Boyd says, and isn't surprised when the other man's eyes show no recognition of what that means.

Salvation is a funny thing. A personal one, too.


End file.
